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ED HERMAN:
Welcome to Poetry Lectures featuring talks by poets, scholars, and educators presented by poetryfoundation.org. In this program, we hear a conversation between Iraqi poet Dunya Mikhail and American poet Katie Ford, in which they explore how the experience of natural and human disasters informs their work. Dunya Mikhail was born in Baghdad in 1965. She worked as a journalist and translator for the 'Baghdad Observer', but she came to the US in the 1990s after receiving criticism from the Iraqi authorities for her writings. She has written five books of poetry in Arabic, two have been translated into English. She currently teaches Arabic at Michigan State University. Katie Ford studied at Harvard and the University of Iowa. She taught at Loyola University in New Orleans, where in 2005 she witnessed Hurricane Katrina. The director of the Harriet Monroe Poetry Institute, Ilya Kaminsky, hosted the conversation, which took place in June 2012. Dunya Mikhail begins by recalling her earliest experience of literature.

As a young girl in Baghdad, her grandmother told her Aesop's Fables as bedtime stories.

DUNYA MIKHAIL:
I can talk about my very first experience with literature. In Baghdad, we used to sleep on the roofs. In summertime, Iraqi sleep on the roofs. And my grandmother, who was living with us would tell me, you know, the bedtime stories. And she was telling me stories that later I learned those were what is called Aesop's Fables, and those fascinated me. But I asked her to give me a book of those fables that I wanted to read myself and look at the pictures. But she said, "There's no such book. This is just told from generation to generation." She said, "That's what you will do for your child in the future." But in the morning when I went downstairs, I went to my notebook and I wrote those fables I heard from my grandmother. I wrote them my own way and I illustrated them. So, that notebook I had of those was my very first experience with literature.

ILYA KAMINSKY:
And Katie, I have a follow-up question for you. How did your correspondence and conversation with Dunya affect your view of poetry coming from Iraq, from another country?

KATIE FORD:
Well, to begin with, I think corresponding with Dunya in the beginning, before we had been in touch and before I knew kind of how friendly and generous she was, I was quite afraid and I think shy as an American poet to be put in touch with an Iraqi who had, well, an Iraqi American 'cause she now has her citizenship. But, you know, to be an American citizen whose country has really destroyed Iraq in so many ways and one feels very humble and ashamed in some ways. So, the correspondence, you know, she never made me feel that way. But I think, you know, coming towards Iraqi poetics and poetry, as an American poet, I felt I was treading on a kind of sacred ground and dangerous in a lot of ways to misspeak about it or to say things that perhaps weren't true. So, the correspondence for me was very important in order to not say things about a poetry and a country that already my country has done so much harm to. So, you know, in our correspondence, I would be able to say, "Well, this is what I'm finding.

You know, I'm finding a lot of the themes of exile is that just because mostly what we have translated from Iraqi poetry is the war poets, or is that thorough in Iraqi poetics? So, you know, and she kind of affirmed that, yes, you know that is very common in Iraqi poetics. So, I think it was very important in that way, and probably impossible to write about Iraqi poetry today without knowing someone from the country since not yet very much has been translated. But I think writing from and in New Orleans when I lived there, you know, I also felt like I was treading on a kind of dangerous land, you know, or sacred as well. I mean, physically, with 80% of the city flooded and citizens dying in that water, the death in the city felt like it was everywhere. So, everywhere you walked felt like you were on the ground where someone's body had, you know, been in the waters. So, writing about that, the subject pressed itself kind of on my consciousness. It didn't feel as much like a choice.

ILYA KAMINSKY:
Could you perhaps share with us if there was a particular poem of Dunya's that first came to your attention?

KATIE FORD:
I first found her work in a New Directions anthology called 'World Beat' that they had collected, you know, their own poets from New Directions and made an international volume. So, I think it was the poem.. well, the book title, 'The War Works Hard', but the poem 'The War Works Hard' of hers that I had first read and was really astonished by. And also found a kind of new way of thinking of a war is something that could be personified, that once a war is launched, it really is a kind of monstrous personality outside of a country's, you know, whether it's a good intention or whatever it may be or bad intention. But that it becomes this monstrosity that cannot, you know, it grows its own limbs. You know, it really is unstoppable in what it can do. So, she and I were talking earlier today that, I had told her that I had kind of stolen that (LAUGHS) for a poem of mine that I wrote called 'Our Long War' and talking about what the war wanted from us and personifying the war.

ILYA KAMINSKY:
Interesting, I wonder if it would be a good moment for us to have Dunya to read that poem. And then maybe Katie could read one of your poems in response.

KATIE FORD:
Sure.

ILYA KAMINSKY:
Would you mind reading the poem-

KATIE FORD:
'The War Works Hard'?

ILYA KAMINSKY:
'War Works Hard'?

DUNYA MIKHAIL:
Yeah, I don't mind. However, I was going to ask Katie about this fascinating poem. She has a new one that I would mention to you, that there's this line that fascinated me that she says, "To bomb them, we must not have heard their music." And this poem title is a foreign song that I translated into Arabic.

ILYA KAMINSKY:
Can I just make sure this is a poem by Katie Ford?

KATIE FORD:
Right.

ILYA KAMINSKY:
The line is?

KATIE FORD:
She just quoted the first line or the first two lines, "To bomb them, we mustn't have heard their music." And this is something I wrote after getting to know Dunya and thinking more about the war. So, it's called 'Foreign Song'. "To bomb them, we mustn't have heard their music or known their waterless night watch. We mustn't have seen how already the desert was under constant death bells ringing over the sleeping cribs and dry wells. We couldn't have wanted this eavesdropping of names we've never pronounced praying to death. I believe in us enough to think we must not have heard their music."

DUNYA MIKHAIL:
I would love to read the Arabic version of that.

ILYA KAMINSKY:
So, you translated this poem into Arabic?

DUNYA MIKHAIL:
Yes, very fascinating poem. (SPEAKS ARABIC), as the title. (SPEAKS ARABIC). Can I ask Katie a question, please? About her work, the Coliseum. I was on a visit to Rome in Italy, and I was thinking of Katie because she... 'cause I visited that place in Rome, Coliseum. And I was thinking of her work, how she used that ancient place and event in her poem writing about the Hurricane Katrina and I learned that she had an experience of displacement from New Orleans and that how... I was thinking of... always as Iraqi, I have the war as, you know, the devastations caused by the humans who are in power. But here, this is caused by nature, although this has no discrimination, you know. But still, is this devastation and this ruination that she is talking about. So, yeah, I wonder if she can speak a little bit about that work, that the important great work of the 'Colosseum'.

KATIE FORD:
Well, the poem 'Colosseum' had been written a few years prior to Hurricane Katrina. And in some ways, the manuscript was already established as a book about ruins but ancient ruins, which I had just been kind of commonly fascinated by as many people are. So, it wasn't so much my own personal experience except for traveling through Italy and seeing these places or having a curiosity about what that structure had been used for and how a simple architectural structure can become such a horrific place of government-sanctioned violence. So, when I then was in New Orleans before and after the Katrina, so many images corresponded that there were really inevitable connections of the Colosseum which had been flooded for games of battle on purpose. And then New Orleans and its own Superdome or its modern Coliseum and the Dome becoming such a place of disastrous refuge that simply didn't work. So, you know, New Orleans became the site of modern disaster. So, these connections, although horrific in many ways became or felt accurate in my mind.

You know, our government at that moment really failing the city, failing the American population. It was really the first time I had seen so much failure up close of a government towards its people. And the inevitable poets for me were the poets who had gone under exiles of their own, you know, from their cities. The Russians under Stalin in particular. It wasn't actually a time I was going to the Arab world, the Arab poets. And so this correspondence for me was very important in my own education really as well. But if I could ask Dunya a question, I wonder, because you were under particular threat of violence, at the very least of violence, if not death, while under Saddam Hussein. How did that shape, I think your poetry or even your life as a writer in the time when you lived in Iraq still?

DUNYA MIKHAIL:
Yes. During my college time, I was in the College of Arts, it's called in Iraq. For here they called Liberal Arts, I think. I was studying English literature. There was a group of writers, we had our own meetings and discussions, something similar to the programs of MFA here. We didn't have a formal MFA, but that was like informal one. And we would share our writings, our paintings, our art, and we'd talk about it. There was... it's hard to know where to start with. This is like a very... I have a lot of memories about this subject of writings before leaving Iraq. But the main thing, the censorship that affected us, not only me, affected us the writers or most of us, censorship in Iraq was an actual department with actual employees, with job description, like to watch what they call public morals to decide what is appropriate or inappropriate for you to read and write. And even if you have your work approved, if they give you OK, still you feel bad because to have a censor instead of an editor.

We didn't have editors. I didn't know there was such thing until I came here and that... So, because of that strong censorship, we watched what we were writing. Some of us did not publish what they were writing. Some of us, including me would use a lot of metaphors and figures of speech, and layers of meanings to try to hide the true meaning like an onion. And that maybe saved my poetry. However, you as a serious poet, you don't wanna use that just as a shield, you wanna use it when you wanna use it. And actually, I remember one of my friends from back home sent me an email recently and said to me, "Your poetry was better before." Because he loved those metaphors and those, you know, that now that I use less, maybe 'cause I use them when I need to after leaving Iraq. Some other... so we had poets in the shade. They call them poets in the shade that they didn't publish, much like Mahmoud al-Braikan, for example, who was hiding his poems in a box so they don't get published. But unfortunately, there were a group of poets who would follow the public formal narratives and would do what the authority wanted the government, which is to mobilize soldiers to go to war and to encourage them to die that senseless death.

And those were the ones awarded. And, you know, and they were I don't know, some of them believed in what they were doing or just the business, I don't know. But these were not really respected by the serious readers. And that's called literature of mobilization. It was even called so in the media. So, yeah, having this lack of freedom of expression affected us. And this is maybe clear in my text 'Diary of a Wave Outside the Sea'. How it is now is published by New Directions in two parts divided by some pictures bilingually. The first part was written in Iraq and the second part written here. And the reader would find a clear distinction or difference in the way is written. The first one is poetical talking about not naming things by their names, for example, resorting to mythology, talking about Zeus, let's say instead of saying Saddam, say Zeus because that's like a mythology is a cruel god who was treating people in a cruel way and so on.

KATIE FORD:
And that was the metaphor that got you in trouble, right?

DUNYA MIKHAIL:
Yes. Yeah. Somebody well, came to... I was working for 'The Baghdad Observer', which was part of the Ministry of Culture and Information. So, somebody was asking me questions, pretending he's journalist. But questions were not really journalistic questions, they more interrogation. And what do you mean by this? What do you mean by that? Who's Zeus? Why did you talk this way? And I was, you know, also answering and pretending that he is a journalist, for example, saying things like, "It's not my task to explain, it's the readers' task." And things like that. Then I left shortly after the publication of 'Diary of a Wave Outside the Sea'.

KATIE FORD:
And what I was struck by in reading Iraqi poetry was the bravery of speech, you know, there's a whole population who's under censorship, but then the poems that come out, once they can be published, it's so courageous in a way. And one passage I'm thinking of is from, and Dunya should correct my pronunciation, but Muzaffar Al Nawab.

DUNYA MIKHAIL:
Muzaffar Al Nawab. Yeah.

KATIE FORD:
There's grotesque passages because of what the reality is, of what goes on to a citizenship for so long under sanctions and wars. I mean, really, it was 30 years that, you know, that Iraq has suffered one kind of war or another. But he writes, "I witnessed it, I saw it with my own eyes, a pregnant woman eating the vomit of her feverish child and feeding the other child with the same black vomit. What wonders Arab oil has done for us?"

DUNYA MIKHAIL:
Muzaffar Al Nawab, he's very popular Iraqi poet. And he writes an interesting thing about him. He's one of a few poets who write in dialect rather than the standard, he uses the dialect. Yes, it is not common. Yeah, people like him so much.

KATIE FORD:
But, you know, to even like kind of those lines, I mean, those lines are very difficult to even recite or hear because of how horrific the scene is. But I was struck in our correspondence and in getting to know Iraqi poetry better just by how willing the poets are, not even just willing, it seems imperative to say very exactly what happened, you know, to say that a young boy, for example, who's trying to cover up his grandmother's legs because she's been shot and it is not... you know, her modesty in death has been compromised. So, he goes towards her and then he is shot and falls upon her. You know, to report these kinds of realities, you know, to bring to global awareness really what a war looks like.

ILYA KAMINSKY:
Just to follow up on these, very powerful images, I remember you speaking as well about Garcia Lorca, the great Spanish poet, when you were discussing your respondents. And you spoke at lunch about the Duende, the concept of the Duende, and how that enters poetics as well. So, we're not just talking about the witness (INAUDIBLE), but metaphysical element as well. Could you speak for a moment about that?

KATIE FORD:
Yeah. You know, in the large part, the Iraqi poetics seems to me to be filled with that kind of, you know what Lorca would say is that dark, darker passion. I mean, there are poems of joy. And, you know, that's one of the difficulties now is you can read Iraqi poetry all through a lens of war and exile. And much of it is about that. But there are also, you know, places of beauty that grow more weighted, that grow in their depth because, you know, the love poem, for example, this could be a love that's going to be or is threatened by the war. But, yeah, it seems to me the poetry takes itself utterly seriously in many ways and does not allow itself to fall into the anecdote. It's not written for its own sake. It always feels like it has a larger, very urgent purpose. It feels like it believes in poetry, how much it can do. It doesn't have a limited sense that the poem is meant to tell about a particular small scene or as we were speaking of earlier, to be comic. Although there are some of those moments as well.

It knows when to portray love and that just a pure moment between two humans.

ILYA KAMINSKY:
Could you perhaps read us a few poems for other of your own or by other poets that you think American audience would appreciate hearing?

DUNYA MIKHAIL:
Sure. Yeah. During our correspondence and by the way, I thank Katie Ford on behalf of Iraqi poets and writers. I thank her because I read her work on the Iraqi poetry. And really not much is done on this level. So, during our correspondence, I was on my way, also I learned a lot myself about ourselves. So, I picked some 15 poets, there are, of course, a lot of great poets, but I'm sure I can read one or two part of their poems. And, you know, most of these boats I know myself on personal level and I have stories and anecdotes with them back home. OK. Fadhil al-Azzawi, he has this poem translated by Khaled Mattawa. The title of the poem is 'In My Spare Time'. I read part of it. "During my long, boring hours of spare time, I sit to play with the earth's sphere. I draw a new colored map of the nations. I roll Germany to the Pacific Ocean teeming with whales, and I let the poor refugees sail pirates' ships to her coast in the fog, dreaming of the promise garden in Bavaria. I switch England with Afghanistan so that its youth can smoke hashish for free, provided courtesy of Her Majesty's Government.

I smuggled Kuwait from its fenced and mined borders to Comoros, the islands of the moon and its eclipse, keeping the oil fields intact, of course. At the same time, I transport Baghdad in the midst of loud drumming to the islands of Tahiti." "I let Saudi Arabic crouch in its eternal desert to preserve the purity of her thoroughbred camels. This is before I surrender America back to the Indians just to give history the justice it has long lacked." And this is Fadhil al-Azzawi. He is now... he lives in Germany. Fadhil al-Azzawi is part of what we call an Iraq, Kirkuk group. And this group, you know, they were raised in the city of Kirkuk, north of Iraq. They included, for example, Jan Dammo and Sargon Boulus. These are among leading poets of Iraq. And they, you know, almost changed the shape of poetry into modern one. And, you know, they have very experimental and modern poetry. But I corresponded with Fadhil al-Azzawi. We have some... we call each other, we have emails. And he told me this interesting story of his mother.

He said... he was talking about how when his mother found out he was writing poetry, you know, so she asked him, "Is it true my son that you are writing poetry and I want to be a poet? Shame of you. You wanna be a respectful man, not a beggar. You know the only business of the Arab poets now is writing poems in praise of the rulers for a handful of Dinars. How could we face people if we had such a son?" So, he remembered that his mother told him that. And he answered her that... he recalled that and he said that that was true, what she was saying. It was not wrong that the poet's main business, even in the time of Jahiliyyah, the pre-Islamic era, was to defend the tribe through poetry and to praise the sheikhs. So, for example, Al-Mutanabbi, a great poet who lived from 915 till 965, you know that he praised the amirs and the sultans and also (UNKNOWN), who was the last great classical poet, called him and Badr Shakir al-Sayyab who was, you know, the pioneer of the free verse movement.

They wrote poems in praise of kings and generals and so on. And during Saddam time, al-Azzawi says that thousands of poems were written praising the leader, what they call the indispensable leader. And they came from far and wide, from everywhere, carrying their long poems in their pockets. And the words of al-Azzawi, said, and the man in Baghdad paid generously and so on. The interesting part, he comforted his mother. He told her, I know an English poet called Eliot, TS Eliot, who became the director of a bank in London. So, when she heard that, she said, "Well, it's all right then to carry on with your poetry writing if you are going to be the director of a bank." (LAUGHS)

ILYA KAMINSKY:
On the other side, some of the more official poets sometimes did write good poems. So, I hope it's not all in black and white. It's not all bad and good. Sometimes a poet may not be a very good and moral person, but they may be a talented writer. Where the case is like that in Iraq?

DUNYA MIKHAIL:
Exactly, yeah. Al-Mutanabbi is a great poet but even though his poetry was in praise of the sheikhs, but even in the time in Iraq, some poets who praised Saddam, their poetry was very, very strong, a lot of images. Here's the predicament, they have the skills, they have the... their poetry is very powerful in techniques as art. But here the theme, which is what they called mobilizing, which is, you know, encouraging for war. So, here it's interesting. The question comes what matters the most, is the theme or the technique, the art. So, it is an interesting issue.

KATIE FORD:
Another really wonderful poem out of Iraq is called 'Supper' by... Dunya, how would you pronounce... Yousef Al Sayegh?

DUNYA MIKHAIL:
Yes. Yousef Al Sayegh.

KATIE FORD:
And this is translated by Saadi Somali(UNKNOWN) and this is 'Supper'. "Every evening when I come home, my sadness comes out of his room wearing his winter overcoat and walks behind me. I walk, he walks with me. I sit, he sits next to me. I cry, he cries for my cry until midnight when we get tired. At that point, I see my sadness goes into the kitchen, opens the refrigerator, takes a piece of meat, and prepares my supper."

ILYA KAMINSKY:
Would you say something about this poet perhaps?

DUNYA MIKHAIL:
Yousef Al Sayegh? Yeah. I like Yousef Al Sayegh despite the fact... and now when you spoke about this, how between being, you know, pro-government and being a good poet, this is a very good example. Yousef Al Sayegh is a great poet. Although he was a Ba'ath Party member and he converted from being a Marxist to Ba'ath and converted also from Christianity to Islam. I mean, that's his personal thing. That's just by the way, mentioning. But the interesting thing, in 2005, Yousef Al Sayegh died at age 72. A debate was generated among the writers in the Iraqi Writers Union in Iraq about commemorating him or not. The writers divided between those who did not want to celebrate him because of his association with the Ba'ath Party and the Saddam regime and those who wanted to honor him as a, you know, as a great writer. At the end, no official commemoration was held. However, everyone would agree that Yousef Al Sayegh is a great poet and playwright. His poetry is that marriage between narration and lyricism.

We were talking, Katie and I about that, how she was highlighting that the lyrics in Iraqi poetry. And here I observed that in America there is this narrative poetry and Yousef Al Sayegh poetry is combines the two in a tone that, what I like about that tone is is not loud, it has the tension inside. And I remember his book, 'The Lady of the Four Apples', it was written in response to an accident that when his first wife died, she was in a car accident and her apples fell down from the window of the car. And I personally remember him, something I never forget how he had an official meeting 'cause he had a position in Iraq. He was a general director of the Department of Cinema and Theater and in the Ministry of Cultural Information. So, he canceled a very important meeting to come listen to us. We were then young, a group of just young poets reading. So, he came to listen and canceled his... his secretary told us that he canceled an official meeting with the high-rank people and stuff to come listen to this young poets.

I never forget. So, he was that type of person. But the interesting thing that what happened after he died and that debate tells us something about what's happening in response to poetry in Iraq.

KATIE FORD:
One thing I think in my experience of just reading the Iraqi poetry available in English today, also, it's you know, there is a dominance of war imagery and themes of exile and violence. But really, I think the poetry is on a deeper level, very concerned or taken with human love. And that, you know, the reason why these things cause such pain is because of love. And Ronny Someck, an Iraqi poet, I really loved his poem called 'Testifying to Beauty'. Partly we need so badly to read the poems out of Iraq so that we see the intimacy shared between the people of that part of the world. But he writes, this is Ronny Someck. He writes, "The most beautiful girl in the world used the pad of her finger to wipe the dust off the label of a bottle in a wine shop in Bordeaux. The fan of this movement is taught at archeology schools when eyes open wide to identify the year of creation."

ILYA KAMINSKY:
Your own work, you are able to bring calm, love, passion, tenderness. So, how does personal privacy (INAUDIBLE) poet, and larger themes of a country come in your work? Perhaps you could illustrate by reading one of the poems.

KATIE FORD:
Yes. I'll read something. Yes, I'll read Flee. So, yeah, I mean, you realize your existence very quickly in these moments of needing to flee. As when I realized I needed to get out of New Orleans as soon as possible. And once we knew the storm was coming, you know, you do have the private experience of panic and fear and all of those things. At that moment, that's really what it is. Then when the gravity of what is going to happen and what will happen hits, I think you start feeling more of the religious or philosophical or, you know, kind of transcendent pain in a way. And of course, in New Orleans, when you have at the time it was a category five storm in the Gulf coming towards New Orleans, you also had to ask, well, what can we wish for that is even, you know, an ethical wish at this point because that storm is going to go somewhere. So, you can't wish for it to go west or east unless you want other humans to suffer it. So, it's very difficult moment religiously or whatever you wanna call it.

What can you want? And I wrote this poem called Flee. "When the transistor said killing wind, I felt myself a small noise. A call sign rubbed out but still live where light cut through the floorboards. And don't you think I dreamed the light a sign? Didn't I want to cross the water of green beads breaking where one saw the other last? Where the roof was torn and the dome cried out that the tearing was wide and far. And this is not just a lesson of how to paint an X upon a house, how to mark one dead in the attic, two on the floor. Didn't I wish? But didn't I flee? When the cries fell through the surface of light and the light stayed light as if to say nothing or what do you expect me to do? I am not human. I gave you each other, so save each other."

ILYA KAMINSKY:
Thank you. It's a great poem. Thank you. Would you perhaps Dunya read for us your poem called 'The War Works Hard'?

DUNYA MIKHAIL:
Yeah, no problem. Although when you, Ilya, I'll tell you the truth, when you are talking about privacy and you mentioned poetry, I thought... yeah, for example, I was thinking of the 'Bags of Bones', how there's privacy in the bones. Yet it's public because being in a graveyard becomes public, but it is also private. But yeah, if you want me to read 'The War Works Hard'.

ILYA KAMINSKY:
Or, you can read any poem you like.

DUNYA MIKHAIL:
I don't like any, but... (LAUGHS)

KATIE FORD:
She's tired of her own (CROSSTALK).

DUNYA MIKHAIL:
I am bored of my old poems. But-

KATIE FORD:
Why don't you start with 'Bag of Bones' and then... yeah.

DUNYA MIKHAIL:
Yeah, OK. 'Bags of Bones'. And this is translated by Elizabeth Winslow. And I thank her. "What good luck! She has found his bones. The skull is also in the bag. The bag in her hand, like all other bags in all other trembling hands. His bones, like thousands of bones in the mass graveyard. His skull, not like any other skull. Two eyes or holes with which he saw too much. Two ears with which he listened to music that told his own story. A nose that never knew clean air. A mouth, open. like a chasm. Was not like that when he kissed her, there quietly. Not in this place, noisy with skulls and bones and dust dug up with questions. What does it mean to die all this death in a place where the darkness plays all this silence?" "What does it mean to meet your loved ones now, with all of these hollow places? To give back to your mother on the occasion of death, a handful of bones she had given to you on the occasion of birth? To depart without death or birth certificates because the dictator does not give receipts when he takes your life.

He has a skull too, a huge one, not like any other skull. It solved by itself a math problem that multiplied the one death by millions to equal homeland. The dictator is the director of a great tragedy. He has an audience too, an audience that claps until the bones begin to rattle the bones and the bags, the full bag finally in her hand, unlike her disappointed neighbor who has not yet found her own bag of bones."

KATIE FORD:
That poem and so many others, I think, you know, did depict people going to a mass grave to try to recover the bones of a loved one. That's the kind of thing that Dunya and many Iraqi poets are willing to not just portray, but feel and look in, you know, look deeply, deeply inside of. And then, you know, how she ends that poem with, but she's lucky you know this what luck it is. So, that kind of irony. And one question I had for Dunya because you used the ironic tone by expressing things like how magnificent the war is, you know, look what it can do, it's so eager and efficient. Is that something that just came about naturally in your own voice? Or is that, would you say, from a particular tradition?

DUNYA MIKHAIL:
Interesting question and I'm not sure of the answer, but I didn't use it actually as a tradition. I think when you have strong feeling, when you are deeply sad, maybe you resort to irony. And it is used, I think, by many other poets. But I don't think as a tradition though, there might become, who knows. (LAUGHS)

KATIE FORD:
We might need it.

ILYA KAMINSKY:
Well, could you perhaps read one more of your poems each of you to close?

KATIE FORD:
Sure, sure. I think I'll read a poem called 'Vessel'. I remember in this poem thinking partly of a John Berryman line from the 'Dream Songs' about not being able to both carry and bear something. And so this idea of the body as a vessel came about in this poem. "We were hardly vessels. What we took in could not be. And so we spat it out as dogs spit out the wretched fish, the only meat. We were not mules, that we put stores on our backs. Half-finished stories thin mothers in frames. We were never vessels. But I wanted so much to be and swallow and carry and bear and not have a mind to mind, nor a mouth to spit, nor a heart to tear into strips of weed from the sea."

DUNYA MIKHAIL:
Yeah, I will read this poem that Katie said she liked called 'The Prisoner'. "She doesn't understand what it means to be guilty. She waits at the prison entrance until she sees him to say, 'Take care of yourself,' as she always used to remind him when he went off to school, when he left for work, when he returned while on vacation. She doesn't understand what they are saying now at the back of the podium in their official uniforms. The report that he should be kept there with lonely strangers. It never occurred to her as she sang lullabies on his bed and those distant days, some day he would end up in this cold place without windows or moons. She doesn't understand." "The prisoner's mother doesn't understand why she should leave him just because the visit is over."

ED HERMAN:
That was Dunya Mikhail reading her poem 'The Prisoner'. Before that, we heard Katie Ford's poem 'Vessel'. The conversation with Ilya Kaminsky was recorded at the Poetry Foundation in Chicago on June 5th, 2012 as part of International Poets In Conversation and were sponsored by the Harriet Monroe Poetry Institute. Two books of poetry by Dunya Mikhail are translated into English, 'The War Works Hard' and 'Diary of a Wave Outside the Sea'. Both are published by New Directions. Katie Ford's books include 'Deposition', 'Storm', and 'Colosseum'. Her poems have also appeared in 'The New Yorker' and 'The Paris Review'. Keep up with the world of poetry by visiting the Poetry Foundation website, where you'll find articles by and about poets, an online archive of more than 10,000 poems, The Poetry Learning Lab, The Harriet Blog about poetry, the complete back issues of poetry magazine and other audio programs to download. I'm Ed Herman. Thanks for listening to Poetry Lectures from poetryfoundation.org.